Strong and Moving!

Just perfect...

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"The Eclipse", is a quiet, gentle masterpiece, an original blend of seemingly incompatible genre. Bit of a horror, tad of a romance and a dash of comedy, but it all stays together and enhances the remarkable flavor. Lonely widower hosts a literary conference, while drowning in the overwhelming current of grief. Hence, he meets two writers and that is pretty much the plot. Simple and unforgettable, directed with an assured hand by the writer Conor McPherson and played beautifully by all three protagonists. Ciaran Hinds stands out among three with strong, but subtle presence. His deep sadness just breaks your heart. Lovely surprise.

I like ghost stories, the older and closer to the abyss I get, and there is one scene in this film that won the day for me. Hinds' character awakes one morning, to find his dead wife sitting on the bed, her hair gone to chemo, looking at him with darkened eyes. He does a double take, and she is still there, her lustrous, long, brown hair shining, and she looking well, a shadow of sad on her face. He is stunned, and cannot move as she gets up, sits down beside him on the bed and hugs him warmly for at least a minute...he weeps openly, and she gets up and drifts away. I cannot embellish that marvelous scene any more....The detractions were the scenes of slasher gore as Hind's character saw visions of his wife's sick father, dead and rotting and grabbing for him....don't quite understand why those were in there, but this was a good film

This is maybe the only film I've seen that has had me start crying, and keep crying even 5 minutes after the film ended... and I couldn't really explain why.It's a really nice mix between hints of supernatural happenings and a very emotional film about a guy living a quite ordinary life.For me, it was very touching and the dialogs and the minimalistic and realistic role play by Ciarán Hinds was brilliant.I can't see how this film could be improved. This film is a great example on how you can make a movie that doesn't stick to the well established genres, and still can be really successful.If you are interested in supernatural ghost movies, this is probably nothing for you as it doesn't contain a lot of that (but a little). If you like emotional movies towards the melancholic direction and, yet, you are prepared to see something a bit different, then this film is for you! It's great.

The Eclipse has lots of good things about it, but in the end, the pieces don't hold together. Part of the problem is the editing and writing. There are many long shots - beautiful - with the most peculiar music playing, a mixture of bad Benjamin Britten and Philip Glass, and it goes on and on, setting a vague, angsty, weird mood. The story is a wisp, and the writing, while good, doesn't fill the film. The interior sets as well as the gorgeous Irish country side are beautiful, but some scenes are so badly shot that you can hardly see what's going on.I kept watching because - besides expecting a payoff - the acting and characters are appealing. Hinds is great - he holds a lot in, myriad emotions flicker across his face, he clearly has a large interior life. The female lead grew on me, although her character is odd and prickly. Quinn, fabulously good, plays a character who's just a plot device to get the others in the right places, but he's so vivid, full-realized, pathetic and despicable at the same time, that the plot should have served him better. When the three leads get together, the film changes, and it's charged, strong, unpredictable, real, surprising.We care about the emotional subject - unresolved grief, the spiritually or psychologically open states we can find out selves in, and how to move on and in to our lives. But it's as if half the film got left on the editing floor - the half with more acting and less music. It's like there are holes in the movie, filled with music. I know there was more there, but we can't see it. Worth checking out anyway for the acting.